Intro:
I used to always identify with the first snowman. Part of my personality is idealistic, sees the good, believes that things can improve, people can change, and greater things are ahead. But this year, for a number of reasons yet un-examined within me, I feel more like I’m in the second group – and I don’t like that. I believe that “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.” (1 Cor 13:7), and don’t like the feelings that nag away, saying the opposite – “go ahead, give up… look at reality, what is there to have faith in anyway?... why hope when you just keep getting disappointed?... why bother enduring through difficulties when you could just escape by snoozing with some lazy snowmen at the base of a tree?...”
I’m not listening to those feelings, I know they speak lies. But I don’t like the appeal they have to me, and so I have to discipline myself and resolve to recognize and fight them. And for me, the best way to fight the subtle lies is with truth – simple, foundational, bedrock truth. I find it helpful sometimes to return to those things that I know to be true, regardless of the circumstances of life, and to put them in front of my face so that I’m forced to see them, recognize them, reaffirm them, and then live out of them. I invite you to walk with me through two of those foundational truths this morning.
I am loved.
The first one is that I am loved. Yes by people, my wife and son, extended family, church community. But the deeper, stronger, firmer truth is that I am loved by God. I don’t really know why – I see the evil in my own heart (at least in part) and know beyond question that I don’t deserve to be loved by a holy and perfect God, I have not and can not earn His affection. But I know it is true anyway. God loves me. So much that God sent Jesus into the world, born into a humble stable, to live a difficult life and then to die an unthinkably horrendous death, and then to be gloriously raised from the dead. As a result of God’s actions, I have been invited to become a child of God’s, by God’s offer of adoption which I accepted.
Now listen carefully: that foundational truth – I am adopted into God’s family – is the basis from which I now live. My actions don’t make me more a child of God’s if I’m really “good”, and they don’t make me less a child of God’s when I’m really “bad”. The foundation is that God adopted me as His Son – I am a member of God’s family. Don’t take my word for it, take God’s Word for it: “4 But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. 5 God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children. 6 And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, “Abba, Father.” 7 Now you are no longer a slave but God’s own child. And since you are his child, God has made you his heir.” (Gal. 4:4-7). Did you hear that, with your ears and your heart? God’s love for us has resulted in His adoption of us – we are not slaves, but children, with an intimate (note the “Abba, Father” words) relationship based on the most secure foundation possible – we are God’s family. That doesn’t change because I act a certain way, positively or negatively, and it doesn’t change even if I feel like God is quiet or distant. The plain, foundational truth: I am loved and am an adopted child of God.
I’m currently leading a small group of people in ministry, and one of the questions we got into a couple of months ago was this: “what do you think it the biggest obstacle to effective ministry today?”. We had great discussion, and my perspective is that the biggest obstacle is truly believing that we are loved by God. If we truly believed that, you and I would live very different lives. If we lived from that security, we would be far bolder in how we live. We would take more risks for God’s Kingdom, knowing that we are secure and that if something fails or gets hard, it doesn’t change our status as God’s children. We would care far less about what other people think, because we’d be living from the perspective that what our Heavenly Father thinks is so much more important. We would care far less about money and possessions, because we would have our need for security wrapped up in the love of God and our status in the eyes of others that comes from material things becomes almost laughable. Our negative emotions would have far less of a hold on us, because anger and jealousy and envy and greed lose most of their power when we live first and foremost from the place that stands unshakably in the truth that we are loved by God and adopted as His children: those other things fall away.
And even more – if we lived from the that place of being God’s dearly loved children day in and day out, we would earnestly pursue all the actions and attitudes that express a love of ours for God in response to His love for us: we would want to, we would be eager to, we would delight in finding new and more ways to do all the right and best things because of this incredible relationship of freedom and love and security. This is (I believe) the very heart of what “worship” actually is: not singing songs in church on Sunday morning, but living every day in delighted responsiveness to the love of God for us. Let’s not underestimate the radical difference here between doing “the right thing” because it is “the right thing” and so we feel we must do it, often grudgingly, resentfully, forcing ourselves because “we have to or we’ll get in trouble”. Living a life of delight in relationship with God as our Heavenly Father is not the same as eating Lima beans “because they are good for you”. Living from the place of really knowing we are a loved child of God is as far opposite from that as you can imagine – it is the delight in a relationship of love of doing the things that bring the greatest joy to the other.
Maybe I got a little carried away, but this is a critical part of the foundational truth to which I need to return. It combats the lies that swirl around me: “not much is happening, you aren’t being “effective” in ministry, you must be doing something wrong, if God really loved you you’d be seeing more results, maybe you should get out or work harder, and then you’ll actually see if God cares…”. When I stop listening to those, I find myself back in the truth of Gal 4 – I am loved. And so are you. That is a place worth living from.
Love is powerful:
Here is the second foundational truth that I find myself needing to be reminded of when I feel like the second group of snowmen: love is powerful.
I’ve just talked about how powerful love is when it is given freely to us by God – it is so powerful that it completely and radically transforms our entire perspective on living. But then I need reminding that for me to live a life of love for others is powerful too.
This one is a little more difficult to accept sometimes. Because often, it doesn’t look like it is true. Often when we hear the news, the power seems to all be in the hands of evil, destructive, greedy, planet-killing, people who seem to get their way. Closer to home, we all know of places where we have done our best to love but it has seemed to have little or no effect: people just don’t seem to listen, or they reject us outright, or we’ve poured out the best that we have and felt like it just got sucked into the ground and made no impact whatsoever.
Before moving back to the side of truth, that love really is powerful, let me first say that I relate to those feelings. In a moment of frustration a little while ago, I contrasted the practice of ministry with the practice of medicine and thought, “I bet if someone went to their doctor with a problem, and their doctor prescribed a particular course of treatment, most patients would go to their pharmacist, fill the prescription, and take the medicine. Most even gladly sign a form allowing a surgeon to cut open their body when necessary. So why do so many people seem to come to their pastor with a problem, hear the response, and then go, “nah… I think I’ll keep doing the same things anyway and hope that everyone else changes instead of me.” Now I know that is an oversimplification, and that most doctors can easily identify with the experience of telling a patient to make essential changes (like stopping smoking) and being ignored, but the point remains: it seems that power is lacking, and that even when we really deeply love, it can seem impotent.
This is why I need this second foundational truth: love is powerful. Here I need to go back to Scripture: 1 Cor. 13
1 If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
8 Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! 9 Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! 10 But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.
11 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
The biggest problem we have with this Scripture is that we’ve romanticized it so that we view it through some fluffy emotional lens, and see it as some lofty idealistic words that aren’t really true but sure make us feel nice when we hear them. Then we miss the real message of the chapter: vs. 1-3 say plainly that we could have every power in the universe, even “understanding all God’s secret plans”, and we could sacrifice our very lives – but without love it would be NOTHING. vs. 4-7 we know and are familiar with, but they describe something we don’t quickly associate with the word “love”, because there isn’t all the nice fluffy emotion that our cultural definition of the word puts first. vs. 8-12 say plainly that yes, it won’t make sense here on earth, we need to grow up and recognize that “all that I know now is partial and incomplete”, and just love. Like God loves. And believe that is powerful.
Conclusion:
I could say much more, but if you and I grasp those two foundational truths in a new or deeper way, and if we actually start 2010 living out of those truths instead of out of the lies we so often believe, it will have been worth our time. Even if this is little more than a reminder of things you already know and are living better than I do, I think the reminder is worth our time also. So here is my last thought.
Most of you have seen this little graphic. We worked quite hard at this several years ago, as church leadership, trying to create an image that would communicate who we are and who we believe God has called us to be as a community of Christ-followers. We went through a long process to come up with a sentence that we believe describes us: “we are a family of God, joyfully choosing to put relationships of love ahead of every other consideration”. I always clarify that “relationships of love” means with God and with others, both the “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions. That got shortened to two words, “love first”, which I like as both a statement and as a command. And then it got depicted graphically in this image. It is two people, slightly different shades – perhaps us and God, perhaps us and our world, perhaps us and each other, reaching towards embrace. Obviously the “heart” shape their arms make symbolize love. And the rest, the orange color, is what I love most. It’s messy. When we were first looking at it, people said “why is it so messy? It looks like a preschooler colored it.” The answer: it’s messy because love is messy.
And that is ok to me. Because I am a child, and if my love is messy, goes outside the lines, looks powerless, then I come back to my foundations: I am loved. God’s love for me is powerful, and my love for others will be powerful also, even if it is (in Paul’s words) “partial and incomplete”. I want to live like that this year, and hope you will also.
